The family car came to a stop 400 feet away. A single figure slipped out of the interior and ran slowly toward him. Harland stood motionless for a few seconds, then jogged, then raced toward the person coming his way.
“Harland, Harland!” rose the voice of his wife, yelling his name.
“I’ll be right there, Sugar, right there.”
The two closed the distance between them as quickly as their late-middle-age legs could carry them. Harland stopped as his wife approached. She had a hand to her head; her eyes were circular, filled with trouble. Breathless from the run, she panted.
“What is it, Sugar? What’s the matter?”
“Harland,” Eda Sven wheezed and then coughed roughly. “Harland, something terrible is happening. There’s been a big accident out west somewhere. It’s terrible. You’ve got to come home.”
“Is that what this is all about, this stuff falling from the sky?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it is. There was some big explosion!”
“I heard it.”
“I did, too. It rattled every window in the house.”
“I thought it was a sonic boom.”
“Me, too. Then I got a call from my sister a little while ago.”
“What’d she say?”
“She told me to turn on the television. Harland, the whole TV is full of some sort of disaster. Nobody knows what it is, but it’s big. Maybe it’s terrorism, Harland. Something horrible. You’ve got to come home right away.”
Harland glanced back toward the John Deere, now a ghost standing in a fog bank.
“Okay, you go back to the car and get to the house fast. I’ll unhitch the planter and get the J.D. back to the house as soon as I can. Go! I’ll be right there.”
Eda Sven simply nodded, holding both hands around the top button of her blouse and pressing them to her throat. Her eyes drifted off and focused on the gray flakes drifting down now by the millions.
“Oh, Harland, what is it?” she warbled, fear rising in the words.
“I don’t know, sugar. Looks like ash.”
Trembling, the woman blurted out, “Is it fallout?”
“Fallout!”
The question stunned the farmer. Fallout. It hadn’t occurred to him. But the question jostled his soul like a jolt from an electric cattle prod.
“Christ in heaven, Eda, go on now! Go. I’ll be right along.”
Harland’s wife turned and ran awkwardly toward the headlights in the distance. Harland spun about and lumbered on scarecrow legs toward the mechanical apparition in the field. He reached the tractor in a blizzard of gray snow and struggled to free the John Deere from the automated seeder. The appendage swung away and Harland scrambled up on the machine and slammed the tractor cab door. He coughed violently for a minute, trying to clear his lungs.
The farmer strained to see through the glass of the cab. Everything about him was the color of dishwater. The cowling in front was visible but little else. He pushed the throttle and swung the nose to the right. He came around 180 degrees and tried desperately to see the row he had just planted. He thought he could make out the furrow. All he had to do was keep the tractor straight and he’d be able to run to the eastern end of the field. He crossed his fingers.
In an attempt to pierce the ghoulish atmosphere, Harland switched on the headlights. The lights brought only tension. The world had lost dimensions. Nothing tangible emerged from the torrent for his mind to grasp. His one comfort was the John Deere. He had spent many a month in that cab and he could sense its steady, powerful demeanor. Its throaty vibrations were reassuring.
The farmer pinched a bit of the gray between his calloused fingers. It crumbled to dust. There was a body to it, unlike firewood ash. The feel of it made him shiver as the word “fallout” sifted through his cranium. What the hell was fallout? Was this it? Was this radioactive? The South Dakotan was overwhelmed with fear of it. He slapped the stuff from his jacket and pants, brushed the material from his hair, and shook his head violently from side to side.
The tractor belched, backfired and shuttered, something the machine had never done. The tractor’s sudden odd behavior brought Harland to attention. He throttled down the machine to idle and listened. The beast was now running rough, laboring. Experience with tractors over a generation told him instantly where this new problem originated. The fuel mix was running rich; too little air was getting into the fuel mix.
The farmer slammed out of the cab and into the blizzard. He released the hood and rocked it up, fumbled for the releases on the air intake manifold, worked them free and reached into the large air filter bed. He lifted the filter out and banged the device against the cowling over and over again, then replaced it.
In the cab again, Harland listened with a trained ear. The engine seemed to be running better, but not as smoothly as it had all day long. The farmer pushed the throttle and put the Deere on the move again, this time a bit faster. He wanted out of the field, out of the dull, snowing darkness.
An eternity sifted by the cab windows but ended abruptly. The tractor bounced, bounded across a shallow ditch and up onto and over the field access lane. Harland stopped the rig, backed it back up onto the dirt track and turned ninety degrees to the left. He was on the lane back to the homestead, but he could not see it. He would have to sense its presence under the tractor’s wheels. He inched the machine along now, barely moving, trying to “feel” where the ditch edges might be and where the wheel ruts in the dirt path were. It was working. He could follow the lane blind.
Two weathered fence posts loomed on either side of the big rig. Good, a great sign. The farmhouse was now just 400 feet way. Harland exhaled in relief, letting his tension hunched shoulders relax a bit. The relief was short lived. The scream of shearing metal shot through the cab, the tractor bucked wildly for several seconds and then seized. A hush filled the cab, broken only by the murmur of ash falling heavily on the metal skin of the machine.
“Man, oh man,” Harland moaned, “what the devil am I going to do now?”
He did not want to stay with the dying mechanism. Not since Vietnam had the rope of fear twisted so tightly about his gut. If he was going to die in this blizzard, he wanted to die at home, not locked in a cold tractor cab lost on a South Dakota farm lane.
He took his jacket off, slipped his shirt from his shoulders and tied it around his head, covering his mouth and nose. He pulled the jacket back on, opened the door of the cab, and stepped out into the darkness. He climbed down, his boots settling into four inches of gritty powder.
Harland kept a hand on the steel of the tractor until he came around to the front of the machine. He pushed his back up against the grill to align himself as straight as he could, then he stepped away toward what he thought was the direction of the house. He nuzzled his boots through the ash to try to find ruts in the lane, but the stuff was softening every feature. He decided to count his paces. He figured he’d need about 150 to reach the homestead.
Standing on the farmhouse porch, Eda Sven strained to peer through the wall of gray streaks. She thought for a moment that she could see a blush of lights, but the indistinct glow disappeared. Now there was nothing but a dark void. Back and forth she paced from the porch to the living room to look at the cuckoo clock above the television. She was frantic. She could not stay still. It was over an hour since she had reached the house. Her husband should have been back no more than half an hour after she had arrived.
He was lost. She knew it. The thought had a strangle hold on her. She’d tried calling her sister and her grown children, but she could not get through. The phone lines were flooded with traffic. Now she was a desperate soul. She had to do something.